Elmo’s verbs!

In English and many other languages we often use the same word for an action and the instrument we use to perform the action (e.g. we hammer with a hammer and brush with a brush). In this study, we want to understand when children notice this and whether learning the name for an action allows them to guess the name for the instrument without it ever being directly demonstrated. To do this, we will teach children new words in “Elmo’s language”, and see if they understand that names for novel actions (like “pebbing”) translate to names for things (e.g., “pebbing” might be performed with a “peb”).

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